The present invention relates to titer plates, particularly to titer plates for microdrop sampling apparatus, and more particularly to an integrated titer plate-injector head for microdrop preparation, storage and transfer.
Current emerging gene sequencing technology, for example, requires the injection of many (e.g., 96-384) microdroplet samples in the range of 0.2 to 2.0 .mu. liters, into arrays of small wells in instrumentation, such as electrophoresis plates.
In order to efficiently and reproducibly introduce the samples, it is highly desirable to avoid hand pipetting procedures, and use a technology that is amenable to robotics. Current procedures require a large amount of sample preparation and processing that results in small liquid samples stored in plastic, disposable titer plates, inside small, simple one-sided wells. Samples must then be extracted from these storage plates with miniature pipettes and placed elsewhere for subsequent analysis or further sample processing.
There are several major problems with current technology that picks up samples with either pipettes or pin grids, including: (1) pipette usage is difficult to control the sample placement and volume with very high precision; (2) pins used to pick up samples have limitations on sample size: larger samples need larger pins and these won't fit into current apparatus for placement of the sample; (3) pick-up of samples generally require larger samples to be prepared, not all of which are used, and this is a major cost factor when expensive or rare samples are involved; (4) pick-up and placement consists of two accurate mechanical procedures; and (5) sample pick-up and placement requires extra steps to sterilize the transfer tool unless it can be made disposable.
The present invention overcomes or simplifies the problems set forth above by eliminating pipette or pin usage, eliminates waste of sample material, eliminates the pick-up procedure for samples, and makes the placement procedure simpler by using self-alignment features, and provides a disposable titer plate-injector. The above referenced problems are solved or reduced by the integrated titer plate-injector head of the present invention that not only can be used for sample preparation and storage, but adds the feature of miniature nozzles to each sample well, thus enabling sample transfer without pipette or pin grid pickup and mechanical transfer procedures that currently must be used. The titer plate-injector head of the present invention may be fabricated from cheap, disposable material by injection molding, for example.